Trump alternative facts are actually lies & there have been a bunch of them…Despite challenges, democracy is worth saving! It’s a precious gift from which our freedoms are based, yet is a fragile thing when the institutions & traditions of democracy come under attack. We’re facing a unique time in our nation’s history. As I keep saying about fascism, don’t think it could never happen here, especially when a large percentage of our citizenry is so given over to falsehoods, extremism & conspiracies. I ask Americans to please not fall for all those Trump alternative facts! Getting right to the newsfeeds we see important articles, as these excerpts come from building-an-autocracy, but I invite you to click on & read the whole thing to see the threats we might be up against:
The bulk of this magazine issue is given over to questions about liberal democracy’s long-term viability. Around the world, democracy looks more fragile than it has since the Cold War. But if it survives for now in America, future historians may well conclude that it was saved by the president’s Twitter compulsion. Had he preserved a dignified silence for a few consecutive months, he might have bled less support and inflicted more damage on U.S. institutions. Then again, a Donald Trump with impulse control would not be Donald Trump. Trump has built the worst-functioning White House in living memory, and its self-inflicted errors have slowed him down almost as much as his personality has. He traveled to Saudi Arabia, but never visited forward-deployed U.S. troops in the region. Potentially positive moments, like North Korea’s release of three detainees on May 10, 2018, are regularly squashed by stupidities, like the leak that day of a White House aide’s denigration of John McCain (“It doesn’t matter; he’s dying anyway”).
Yet even as Trump ties his own shoelaces together and lurches nose-first into the Rose Garden dirt, he has scored a dismaying sequence of successes in his war on U.S. institutions. In this, Trump is not acting alone. He is enabled by his party in Congress and its many supporters throughout the country. Republican leaders and donors have built a coping mechanism for the age of Trump, a mantra: “Ignore the weird stuff, focus on the policy.” But the policy is increasingly driven by the weird stuff: tariffs, trade wars, quarrels with allies, suspicions of secret deals with the Russians. The weird stuff is the policy—and it is transforming the president’s party in ways not easily or soon corrected. Maybe you don’t care about the president’s party. You should, because a liberal democracy cannot endure if only one of its two major parties remains committed to democratic values.
Weakened institutions will be challenged from multiple directions: We are already hearing liberals speculating about 1930s-style court packing as a response to Trump’s cramming of the judiciary. The distrust of free speech on campus is being carried by recent graduates into their jobs and communities. We see in other countries, especially the United Kingdom, the rise of an activist left nearly as paranoid and anti-Semitic, as disdainful of liberal freedoms and democratic institutions, as the so-called alt-right in the U.S. It could happen here. Restoring democracy will require more from each of us than the casting of a single election ballot. It will demand a sustained commitment to renew American institutions, reinvigorate common citizenship, and expand national prosperity. The road to autocracy is long—which means that we still have time to halt and turn back. It also means that the longer we wait, the farther we must travel to return home.
Lessons from other fallen democracies
We must learn from events that have taken place in places like Hungary: hungary-democracy-aut
There are, of course, significant differences between the situations in Chile almost half a century ago and in the US today. And yet the similarities are sobering. Having once lost democracy in Chile, I can recognise the signs of malignancy that fester in the US, a country of which I am now a citizen. I reluctantly note in my adopted homeland the same sort of polarisation that contaminated Chile before the coup; the same weakening of the bonds of a shared, inclusive national community; the same sense of victimhood among large swaths of the populace, troubled that their command over the traditional contours of their identity is slipping away; the same faulting of intruders, upstarts and aliens for that loss; the same tensions and rage exacerbated by shameful disparities in wealth and power. And, alas, the same seduction by authoritarian, simplistic solutions that promise to restore order to a complex, difficult, menacing reality.
Blaming this on a president contemptuous of the rule of law, who inflames confrontation in a country urgently needing consensus and dialogue, or the cowardice of leaders of his party who have enabled such intemperance, or a foreign power for intervening to stir havoc, misses the crucial point and does not answer the question of how to stem such a tide of rising illiberalism. Again, Chile provides a blueprint, warning us that democracy can be subverted only if large multitudes stand by and look away while it is corroded and demolished. Our deepest values are in most danger when people feel defenceless and despairing, mere spectators watching a nightmare slowly unfold as if there was nothing they could do to stop it, ready to abrogate their responsibility. It is ultimately the passivity of those silent accomplices that eats away at the fabric and foundations of a republic, leaves it vulnerable to demagoguery and dread.
The main lesson that the Chilean cataclysm bequeaths us is to never forget that the rights we take for granted are fragile and revocable, protected only by the unceasing, vigilant, vigorous struggle of millions upon millions of ordinary citizens. Salvation can’t be outsourced to some sort of heroic figure who will ride to the rescue. The only real saviours are the people themselves. Unless we understand this, we risk awakening one day in a land that is unrecognisable, with consequences that will be paid for by generations to come. My message to my fellow Americans, and to many others abroad, is alarmingly simple: do not cry tomorrow for what you did not have the courage and the wisdom to defend today.
Minority Mob Rule
The threats to democracy are presented inside james-madison-mob-rule,
So on the one hand, we have a president who lost the popular vote, the second time that has happened in the past five elections; a House districted in such a way that even a large, 5-point victory by Democrats in the popular vote in November wouldn’t give them a majority of seats; a Senate elected by a skewed, unusually white cross-section of America, where the median Senate seat is substantially more conservative than the median American voter; and a Supreme Court that is dismantling one party’s political economic base and helping preserve, even strengthen, the other party’s anti-majoritarian hold on power.
Trust in Media far higher than Trump alternative facts
While it’s fair to say logical Americans can perceive the mainstream media as leaning left, those Americans residing outside the clutches of the toxic echo can also plainly see our president is a pathological liar: poll-more-voters-trust-m
President Trump has incessantly focused his ire on the mainstream (i.e. real) media, even more than he has assailed the courts, the rule of law and Democrats. “Enemy of the people” and “fake news” have become familiar chants for Trump and his cultists. This should surprise no one. It’s what autocratic leaders do: They bully, delegitimize and impair an independent press as a means of husbanding their power and disabling critics who would hold them accountable for their conduct. As Yascha Mounk, an expert on the rise of authoritarianism and decline in democracy, has explained: “The point of democracy is to empower people to hold elites accountable when they aren’t being sufficiently responsive to their interests. So lots of democratic politicians run on saying that elites have become remote and that they plan to serve the forgotten people. … So what defines populists — and makes them dangerous — is the claim that anybody who disagrees with them does not have a legitimate role to play in democratic politics.” And whoever introduces facts at odds with the regime’s propaganda must also be illegitimate — or “fake.”
Moreover, in many of Trump’s fights with the media — e.g., the Russia investigation is a “hoax” — voters overwhelmingly side with the factual account (i.e. no, it’s not a hoax) presented by mainstream media rather than the rantings from Trump and his media pawns in the Fox News nighttime lineup. As if it were some Maoist exercise in self-criticism, plenty of media critics would say that the media is failing and must change how it reports on Trump. Really? There is always room for self-improvement, but constant fact-checking, self-contained headlines (“Trump falsely claimed …”), dogged investigative reporting and a track record of accuracy (e.g. Michael Cohen did plead guilty, Paul Manafort was convicted) have served the media well. It’s not the media’s job to lure Trumpists out of their cult, but rather, to inform and earn the trust of those open to learning about reality. So far, like the courts, the media is doing its part to stand up to Trump.
Trump alternative facts on steroids
Lying is a political strategy while his staff & pundits follow his lead. So everyone involved in the president’s punditry world & cult have resorted to Trump alternative facts instead of the truth. Trump was indoctrinated at a very early age into the Norman Vincent Peale preaching on the power of positive thinking, from which he embraced that philosophy & put it on steroids. The monster that’s been unleashed within Trump is to never show weakness & never admit mistakes, as seen inside donald-trump-rules-comm
Still, it’s disconcerting to read a Woodward book that reveals a presidency just as malignant and dysfunctional as the Nixon administration, although in different ways. I confess that I didn’t expect to see two presidents with such monumental character flaws twice in my lifetime. If I didn’t know better I would think there’s something wrong with the Republican Party that it keeps electing these people. There are many differences between the two men, starting with Trump’s frightening lack of preparation, intellect and general knowledge by comparison with Nixon. But on a character level, they show similar flaws. Trump lacks Nixon’s sometimes maudlin sentimentality and Nixon didn’t manifest the grandiose self-regard that Trump uses to mask his insecurities. But both presidents have a petty, mean vindictive streak and a fetish for never showing “weakness.” And both will be remembered for a total lack of normal human empathy.
Nixon’s flaws in that regard are well-known. The man mastered politics and policy but he was a cold fish. The fact that he climbed as high as he did with such a prickly personality was a testament to his perseverance and ambition. But Donald Trump is something else again. His inability to care about anything but himself is so glaring and obvious that it’s pathological. Woodward’s book is full of examples of Trump being unable to compromise, apologize, change course or otherwise behave like a mature adult because he sees anything less than total dominance as weakness. And since he is so often a failure, and cannot admit it, he simply lies and says that he actually won. During the campaign, when asked if he had ever asked for forgiveness, Trump memorably replied, “I like to be good. I don’t like to have to ask for forgiveness. And I am good. I don’t do a lot of things that are bad.” When he was forced to make the one and only apology he’s ever made (for his crude comments on the “Access Hollywood” recording) he apparently made a promise to himself to never do it again. Woodward has him railing at former White House staff secretary Rob Porter for convincing him to give a mildly conciliatory speech after the Nazi marches in Charlottesville.
As for human empathy, that’s been obvious since he first started running for president. (New York journalists would say it’s been obvious for 30 years.) He made fun of a disabled journalist, insulted women as being too ugly for him to assault, degraded Gold Star parents, calls African-American women “low IQ” — the list goes on and on and on. The president’s behavior toward the widow of Army Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in Niger last fall, was a perfect example. He failed to offer comforting words and then petulantly defended himself on Twitter, bringing down a barrage of abuse from his followers on the grieving widow at the worst moment of her life. We talk a lot about Trump’s egomania, dishonesty and incompetence, which are dangerous traits when it comes to any president. But, like Nixon before him, he also has some serious character defects. He is fundamentally bereft of empathy and human compassion, which may be the most disqualifying characteristic of all.
Closing in on 5000
That’s a stunning number of verifiable lies coming from a president less than two years in office. It’s Trump alternative facts run amok! Correction, there’s late word Trump has now exceeded 5000 lies!: analysis-president-trum
More than two-thirds of every factual claim made by President Trump at two of his rallies turns out to be false, misleading or unsupported by evidence. In July, The Fact Checker examined every factual claim made by the president at a rally in Montana. He returned to Montana on Sept. 6, and we decided once again to put every statement of material fact to the truth test to see whether the July rally was an outlier. In July, 76 percent of his 98 statements were false, misleading or unsupported by the evidence. Last week the tally, out of 88 statements, was 68 percent. The average percentage for the two rallies was 72 percent.
Trump may have done slightly better, fact-wise, at the more recent rally because he spoke more about bills he had signed and actions he had taken. But he veered off course with his tendency to unnecessarily hype good economic data with assertions that it was the best in U.S. history. We didn’t double-count statements when the president repeated himself, or else the number of false claims would be higher. We avoided trivialities or opinions. (Two comments he made on Sept. 6 about Democratic candidates in other states might be fairly viewed as opinions, so they were not included.)
Here’s a breakdown for the Sept. 6 rally: 36 false statements, 22 misleading statements and two unsupported claims. We also counted 28 accurate or mostly accurate statements. All told, on Sept. 6, only 32 percent of his statements could be considered accurate or mostly accurate. At both events, at least 40 percent of his claims were false or mostly false. Small wonder then that the president is on the cusp of surpassing 5,000 false or misleading claims since the start of his presidency, according to The Fact Checker’s database.
More on the Bob Woodward book
Accounts of the White House in the Bob Woodward book are spot-on accurate. Woodward’s impeccable reputation precedes him, plus that general theme of Trumpian chaos is consistent with the incidents exposed in the NY Times op-ed & books released this year by Omarosa & Michael Wolff. And there’s another book coming that Stormy says will blow peoples’ minds: stormy-daniels-trump-me
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Evenings on Fox News is pure brain-rot
Fox News actually does present real news with real journalists, typically during late mornings (although still with a far-right slant) & in the afternoons. The evening prime-time shows is when the network goes hellbent psychotic! Those unscrupulous hosts are entertainers competing with other entertainment shows, so for ratings they sacrifice facts in favor of dredging up drama which captivates their viewers with fear & anger. Articles helping expose the deranged bombasts coming from the morally-bankrupt, maniacally-disingenuous hosts who pollute TV’s across America with lunacy when tuned into Fox on weeknights, are revealed inside these links by order of appearance: tucker-carlson-rhe
Anatomy of yet another crazy conspiracy
Because Fox & the echo constantly lie to their audiences, it is our mission here at TheVORACS to present the truth & rebut all the noise out there. As is clearly illustrated in the articles we post from the newsfeeds, the stupidity & pandering from the far-right echo to their clueless viewers knows no bounds. Fox not only coordinates their proven lies with Trump, but also his sycophants in Congress like the nutjob Jordan, seen in these posts from jim-jordan-peter-strzok-t
President Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress are making a renewed stink about former FBI agent Peter Strzok’s texts, this time alleging newly released ones are evidence Strzok leaked about the Russia investigation to the media. As ThinkProgress detailed on Tuesday, reaching that conclusion requires a tortured reading of the texts. In April 2017, Strzok messaged another FBI agent and said, “I want to talk to you about media leak strategy with DOJ.” Strzok had a long history of working to combat leaks as part of his work for the Bureau, and the text came two months after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a major anti-leak campaign. As Strzok’s attorney has pointed out, his reference to “media leak strategy with DOJ” clearly refers to his role working with Sessions to combat leaks. Despite the straightforwardness of Strzok’s texts, Republicans are interpreting it as evidence that Strzok was leaking, and are saying so loudly on Fox News.
On Wednesday, one of the Republicans who has most aggressively tried to protect Trump by pushing FBI conspiracy theories — Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) — went on Fox News and pushed the conspiratorial interpretation of Strzok’s texts. He was met with zero pushback from host Sandra Smith. Jordan’s appearance was the second he made on Fox’s family of channels on Wednesday morning. Earlier, he appeared on Stuart Varney’s Fox Business show, where his conspiracy theorizing was also accepted uncritically. Later in the day, Fox Business posted a tweet containing a false Jordan claim from the Varney interview. “There was certainly a leak strategy going on,” Jordan was quoted as saying, even through a straightforward reading of Strzok’s texts indicates the opposite — that Strzok was actually working to prevent leaks. But Fox Business shared the false claim and accompanying video without so much as attempting a fact-check.
To sum up, Republicans fabricated a conspiracy theory to protect the president, then went on Fox News to spread it. And instead of trying to do the basic journalistic tasks of fact-checking and asking tough questions, Trump’s favorite network went out of its network to uncritically spread it. In contrast with the uncritical treatment he regularly benefits from on Fox News, Jordan’s conspiracy theories haven’t held up to the slightest bit of scrutiny when he’s faced tougher lines of questioning on CNN or during congressional hearings.
More articles on those Trump alternative facts & insane conspiracies are in links below. The only reason for propagating all these made-up stories is in stringing together loose connections trying to discredit the Mueller probe, but in concocting these twisted tales which their doting base somehow believes, it’s unjustifiably doing tremendous damage to the reputations of the DOJ/FBI that are tasked with keeping America safe. The more people who believe these lies paraded out about our intelligence communities, the more it hinders their ability to do their jobs & be found credible when they do track down legitimate threats to our security, which only puts America in greater danger.
Prepare to be outraged when clicking on this next link detailing how the latest conspiracy theory is remarkably dishonest even by Trump’s standards: trump-strzok-page-t
There’s a symbiosis at play here among Trump, conservative media and Republican elected officials. Embracing a questionable conspiracy theory is a fast-track to Fox News interviews and positive articles in Breitbart and the Daily Caller. A defense of Trump plays well in red districts where the president is still overwhelmingly popular. The alchemy here is not mysterious. It’s an important point to remember, though, as midterms loom and questions about Trump’s non-Russia-related activities continue to mount. Congress is meant to act as a check on the president. At this point, though, the House Republicans who spend the most time in front of microphones seem to be ones whose instinct is the opposite.
Swagger
Trump’s head of state wants to be known as “Swagger”: hayesbrown/mike-pom
Kavanaugh confirmation in doubt
There’s a fly in the ointment. The Senate judiciary vote was pushed back to next week. Could they have found a poison pill to blow up his nomination? Some kind of new info was given to the FBI, something of a sexual nature. Perhaps a sexual assault from high school? Prepare for a possible Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill part 2 remake? Here are a few newsfeed articles:
https://www.politico.com/story
https://www.huffingtonpost.com
https://www.vox.com/identities
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